| My latest working theory for why DMT elicits similar experiences across different users was actually inspired by Google's "Deep Dream" art: https://research.googleblog.com/2015/06/inceptionism-going-d... "We know that after training, each layer progressively extracts higher and higher-level features of the image... The final few layers assemble those into complete interpretations—these neurons activate in response to very complex things such as entire buildings or trees." I'm not an expert, but from the little I know of neuroscience, the human brain also has higher level interpreters inside of it. It is why, for example, that pareidolia (seeing faces in objects) is a thing (https://www.reddit.com/r/Pareidolia/). "So here’s one surprise: neural networks that were trained to discriminate between different kinds of images have quite a bit of the information needed to generate images too" "One way to visualize what goes on is to turn the network upside down and ask it to enhance an input image in such a way as to elicit a particular interpretation" So I believe that what DMT is doing is triggering our high level interpreters to make sense of thoughts and emotions that we have. We do the same thing when we dream, where we interpret an event of the day in a very vivid, novel fashion, sometimes even creating story arcs around it. |